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Sophie von La Roche

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Biography

Sophie von La Roche was born in Kaufbeuren, present-day Germany, the oldest child of the doctor Georg Friedrich Gutermann and his wife, Regina Barbara Gutermann (née Unold). Gutermann was originally from Biberach. La Roche spent the majority of her childhood in Augsburg, under strict Pietist upbringing, and made frequent visits to Biberach. There she became the friend of Christoph Martin Wieland, and became engaged to him.

In 1753, however, she married Georg Michael Anton Frank Maria von La Roche—completely surprising to her fiancé Wieland, who at the time lived in Switzerland. Georg von La Roche was an illegitimate son of Anton Heinrich Friedrich von Stadion and a dancer, Catharina La Roche. Stadion took custody of the boy and provided for his education as a secretary. Georg and Sophie had eight children, five survived past childhood: Maximiliane (1756–1793), Fritz (born 1757), Luise (born 1759), Carl (1766–1839) and Franz Wilhelm (1768–1791).

From 1761 to 1768, Sophie La Roche was a lady of the court at her father-in-law's castle Warthausen, near Biberach (where Sophie and Wieland encountered each other once again). There was a comprehensive library (1,440 volumes, 550 works) at the castle, which is today mostly at the Bohemian castle Kozel near Pilsen. She composed letter correspondence in court-sanctioned French and accompanied the Count often to his country estate in Bönnigheim. Through the Count's will, La Roche's husband was appointed as supervisor of the Bönningheim estates. La Roche followed her husband there in 1770, and it was there that she completed—on the advice of a parson friend—the novel she had already begun at Warthausen, Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim (History of Fräulein von Sternheim). The novel was published by Wieland in 1771.

Georg von La Roche supervised the Stadion-Warthausen estates until 1771, when he became privy councillor of the Electoral Archbishop of Trier. The career change prompted a move for the family to Ehrenbreitstein. La Roche held a literary salon in their home in the borough of Koblenz, one that Goethe mentions in Dichtung und Wahrheit. Among the habitués were Johann Bernhard Basedow, Wilhelm Heinse, the Jacobi brothers, and Johann Kaspar Lavater. She became friends with Johann Heinrich Jung and introduced him to his second wife, Maria Salome von Saint George.

In 1780, La Roche's husband was fired from his office by Electoral Archbishop Clemens Wenzeslaus, due to his outspoken critical opinions of the church. With that, the elegant salon circle in Ehrenbreitstein came to a sudden end. The family was taken in by a friend in Speyer. In 1788, Georg's death left Sophie widowed. Due to the French Revolutionary occupation of the left bank of the Rhine in 1794, La Roche's widow's pension was cut off, so that she felt forced to secure her income through writing. After her husband's death, she spent her time in Speyer and Offenbach am Main, and traveled to Switzerland, France, Holland and England, which experiences prompted her to write and publish travelogues.

Through her daughter Maximiliane, who was married to the businessman and diplomat Peter Anton Brentano, La Roche became the grandmother of Bettina von Arnim and Clemens Brentano. When Maximiliane died in 1793, La Roche took in three girls of the couple's eight children.

La Roche died in Offenbach am Main. She is buried at the outer wall of the St. Pancras Church in Offenbach-Bürgel.

In the thirteenth book of his Dichtung und Wahrheit, Goethe writes of Sophie von La Roche:

"She was a wonderful woman, and I don't know another to compare her to. Slim and delicately built, more tall than short, she kept a certain elegance into her later years, an elegance which hovered charmingly between the behavior of a fine lady and a worthy middle-class woman."

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